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Musings, rants and raves on the world of shopping carts and e-commerce, fortified with related business, legal and economic news, as well as announcements about my work on Zen Cart. Brought to you by That Software Guy.

Now that Discount Chooser is becoming the gold standard for discounting offers in ZenCart, osCommerce, and (soon) OpenCart, I have decided to reduce the price of Better Together Admin.Better Together Admin for Zen Cart and Better Together Admin for osCommerce are now price reduced to just $30 for software only, or $90 for the software plus installation. If you have been holding off on buying the Better Together Admin Panel, now is your chance.

If your discounting needs are limited to BOGO style offers, Better Together is still a great choice, so I hope a lot of people will take advantage of this lower price.

When I first created Free Gift Chooser, it only offered 100% discounts (“free gifts”), based on the content of the cart. About a year later, I added the ability to do price reductions – percentage or dollar based. So the name “Free Gift Chooser” was no longer very accurate.

With the pending release of the Free Gift Chooser algorithm for OpenCart, I’m taking this opportunity to rename the Zen Cart and osCommerce versions of Free Gift Chooser to Discount Chooser (and similarly, to rename Free Gift Spender for Zen Cart to Discount Spender).

If you are using Better Together Admin (Zen Cart or osCommerce) and getting a log message that looks like this:

Only variables should be assigned by reference in YOUR_ADMIN/includes/xajax/xajax_core/xajaxPluginManager.inc.php on line 268

or this:

PHP Strict Standards: Non-static method xajaxPluginManager::getInstance() should not be called statically, assuming $this from incompatible context in YOUR_ADMIN/includes/xajax/xajax_core/xajax.inc.php on line 269

Every once in a while, a European customer complains that tax recalculation in my Zen Cart mods is not working correctly for their store with multiple levels of embedded taxes. (This is also an issue in osCommerce.)

Here’s what to look for: non-unique strings in the descriptions of taxes (this is shown in Admin->Locations/Taxes->Tax Rates)

Because of the way Zen Cart (and osCommerce) represent taxes in the order object, the tax descriptions must be unique to allow for reverse lookups. So try changing the strings “Varav moms” to “Varav moms (1),” “Varav moms (2),” etc. to make them unique.